With $382 billion you could:
* build roughly 40 million houses in developing countries (say +/- $10 thousand dollars a day – a relatively fancy house),
* or feed 21 million people per year (say +/- $5 per day per capita);
* or significantly provide education and the means for developing countries.
* etc…

The main reason why F-22 and JSF are hyper expensive is because the Pentagon in its infinite wisdom has made Lockheed Martin the sole monopoly of the US Fifth generation manned fighter aircraft instead of constantly playing one firm against the other to drive innovation and cut costs.

The UCAVs are all on time and on budget because you have Northrop Grumman,Boeing,General Atomics and Lockheed Martin all competing with each other with no single manufacturer given a monopoly on this.

I think it makes sense for the US to just can the F-22/JSF programs and do a UCAV type multi vendor procurement for the sixth generation fighter to Enter service in roughly 2025,this will coincide with China's induction of its fifth generation aircraft so the US/West will always stay a generation ahead.

A similar situation exists in the Navy,the mighty US Navy can only buy ships from 2 shipyards(as opposed to a dozen in the EU with a collective naval procurement budget 1/10 that of the USN) i.e Newport News and Electric boat who have effectively formed a cartel nowadays ships cost 4-5 times more in inflation adjusted terms.

But then again washington hasn't been acting very intelligently of late

Tell us more. What else could you do with other people's money? Who or what prevents you from giving away your worldly possessions to the needy of the world?
Those $382 billion would provide an awful lot of birth control, too, to the developing countries so that they would not perpetuate their abject poverty...

One is with first world technological powers who have sophisticated radars, missiles and jet fighters.

The other is Barbaric Tribesman who have never rode an airplane, cannot fathom a microwave oven let alone radar operation, and cannot read the Sunday comics. Propeller Cesnas with a 50 caliber machine gun can be effective. OR a used Boeing 727 with laser guided bombs.

We need a simple, low tech propeller powered air corps for counter insurgency, not stealth jets that can land vertically. The cost of one F-35 can probably purchase a whole wing of off-the-shelf civilian aircraft, model planes and used but serviceable jets.

China? We will never (well, in this century at least) fight China in a conventional war. Both US and China are too smart for that. Therefore, F-35 will be useless against China. Lets face it - the official designated bombee for the next few decades (at least) will be Pakistan. The strategic question then becomes - do we bomb Pakistan with drones (like we do right now), or do we really need F-35? In my view, drones are doing a fine job as it is.

The question I have is, what mission does the F-35 really have? No other country in the world is radically upgrading its air force or other military capabilities, so why are we spending money on this plane? In fact, most of the rest of the world is flying upgraded versions of Cold War era jets....so long as America just produces new up-to-date versions of the F-15 and F-16 and keeps up its top-notch pilot training, we should be fine. The F-35 sounds to me like a solution searching for a problem.

I love the toys, but the program will never be developed to any significant extent.
Foreign air forces will not buy the things as soon as somebody (China comes to mind) develops drones that can beat these engineering overkills in every type of combat, including dog-fights, for less than a tenth of the price.
Basically, it is like another Maginot Line, still in the planning stages.

Parelhas has priorities mixed. Housing and education for the poor do not help the corporations break into (literally) new markets and stay (record breakingly) profitable. To the people making decisions, war and profits are what tax dollars are for; not helping the huddled masses.
If only Oxfam had the lobby dollars to match Lockheed...

In initial attack mode for stealth everything is carried concealed to avoid radar signature. It is flying clean. No external payload, external bombs or fuel tanks. The purpose is to knock out radar, command and control and missile sites much like the first phase of the Libyan campaign.

Afterwards, stealth becomes less needed, and the plane switches to dump truck mode: two 1500 gallon external fuel pods, eight external hookups for bombs, missiles or munition. Range doubled, payload tripled, more ordinance than a B-17. But big as a bumblebee skimming flowers in the garden.

This plane has attack, air superiority, carrier aviation, VTOL helicopter mode, radar suppression, and stealth attack roles, each as different as medical specialists populating a hospital.

I would propose a special assassination edition to take out Sadamm Hussein, Bin Ladin or Quadafi at the earliest onset of a conflict. A socially aware jet that can use social networking to locate and deliver a heat seeking tweet..

In my opinion, there are two reasons for the current problems facing the F-35

1 - When you try to do everything at once, you fail everything at once, A and C variants might have been a lot more successful if large parts of them don't also have to meet VTOL requirements when shared with the B variant.

2 - Gross over-estimation of your technical capabilities, resulting in system designs that uses far too many new technologies, technologies that only during development were discovered to be a lot less mature than they had assumed, and by which time it is far too late. The Helmet Mounted Display is one such example

Having said that, there is really no alternative other than going back to legacy fighters. Drones that can even come close to the F-35's capabilities are not going to be any easier to develop by a long shot. At the present there are zero capability anywhere in the world for drones that can engage in air-to-air missions, and without air superiority, tactical drones might as well be target drones. Drones might have the range to fly to China, but the only thing it will be doing once it gets there is to get shot down by some 1960s Mig with AWAC support, now won't that be something.

China is not capable of developing more advanced fighter than the west. They can only copy our designs and are unable to innovate like the west. They will always be one generation behind on everything.

All of which will be ready for export by 2020 when most of the 4th gen aircraft are near the end of their structural lives.

So there is a need...The point is by then the US industry will be able to produce sixth gen aircraft which the rest of the world won't so it makes sense to can the JSF after say 500 planes and then have a proper competition for Sixth gen fighter with a number of aircraft being chosen to prevent the sort of monopolistic rent seeking being practiced by Lockheed martin after cornering the market for manned fifth gen fighters.

Yes - mass produce the drones so their operators can get up in the morning, drop their kids off to work, drop bombs on a distant land and then head home for dinner. Definitely better for the US (not so good for Pakistan as they know), but it does raise issues of ease of "doing" war relating to the frequency as well as moral issues relating to machines killing individuals and certainly unavoidably civilians.

We can also buy ships from Lock-mart and its consortium in Wisconsin as well as General Dynamics and Austal in Mobile ... Albeit for smaller boats like the Littoral Combat Ships and new and newish destroyers.